Why APAC should look to Europe, not the US, for programmatic solutions

Marketing 101 teaches us that different groups of people need to be engaged with in different ways depending on their age, location, familiarity with your brand and their propensity to buy. Infectious Media's Managing Director, Attila Jakab, explains to The Drum Asia.

Unfortunately, this fundamental marketing principle is being neglected in APAC, by agencies presenting their ‘APAC programmatic strategy’.

The idea that an overarching APAC strategy can succeed involves ignoring the region’s different languages, different alphabets, different currencies, different go-to sites for news and content, different mobile chat platforms and different levels at which mobile or desktop platforms are used to access the internet.

The alternative to this homogenous approach exists and has been shown to work halfway across the world, in Europe.

For European ad tech players, the diversity of the continent – 50 countries, 38 different languages and 28 different currencies – was once a significant hurdle to overcome.

Having risen to this challenge by creating programmatic campaigns managed from a central hub and adapted easily for different markets, European ad tech businesses have essentially gone through a Darwinian battle for survival, and those that have come out on top could transform the success of programmatic in Asia.